On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

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"No lens of the soul can remain hidden and opaque during this investigation."

Ugh. I'll have to go and find them, but even Steiner himself explains why this is simply not true. I think our first actual steps in phenomenology already explain this, however, you'll be more apt to enjoy and be moved by the various times Steiner makes clear that there is no pure spiritual experience that is free from distortions, generalizations, and deletions. He will explain to you why there could always be an experience that pulls out 'more' or that fixes the previous. And you'll agree with Steiner. You'll come back and say something like, "Well, of course there is always an interplay of lenses that are not yet grasped in what is being grasped..." and I'll say, "Yep, I was just responding to your specific words, the ones I quoted; because I don't agree with you."

And this disagreement points to some fundamental differences. Yet: my way allows me to see your way and respect and know that it is bearing fruits. Your way can't even begin to reflect back simple things I've said without speaking in extremes. There's a reason for that! But we are so far from getting there at this point.

The good news is; I'm still learning from you.

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Ashvin, please take a moment to respond to my questions about your exact clairvoyance in the context of observing the etheric body of plants while looking at a seed.

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And, at the ground floor, the most important thing, we can vividly imagine experiencing everything inside and out as mere percepts juxtaposed in time and space, having no relationship to anything else at all. Some people say that if we haven't vividly imagined this, we can't even begin. It shows us something. Some say it shows us exactly what must be the case before we can grasp a reality that is free from thinking. Some say that without this vivid imagination, we can't exactly grasp pure thinking. Even if you don't agree with those people, you can take the time to build up the imagination and have it for yourself. Is this what Steiner meant by 'the first form in which we encounter reality...'

See for yourself. Oh, and then read what he says. Either ways: it's vivid.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin said 'everything'. Look:

"Why must everything of value in this domain only arrive in the future?"

Future readers: go and find where I said that nothing of value is found now. Each time you see me talk about great value in the present, collect Ashvin's pattern of communication.

I'll back later, but I can tell you, Ashvin, are in the mode that requires I demonstrate that I'm reading your words very carefully.

Yes, you are reading much too carefully, like analyzing each tonal intensity within a musical phenomenology You could just as easily ignore the word "everything" and still understand the spirit of what I am communicating. That is, you keep talking about the "Anthroposophists of the future" as if it is unimaginable that those of today (or Steiner himself) have already understood and overcome the conditioning obstacles you are referring to.

Of course, even when we awaken within the etheric spectrum, we are still conditioned by deeper contextual constraints, and so are the Angels, Archangels, etc. The point is that we can continually unveil the nature of those constraints and become sensitive to how they condition our understanding of the objective ideal relations, the interfering harmonic activity of intuitive be-ings (including ourselves). That is exactly what separates the Divine perspectives from the average human perspective - the former are not unconscious of the higher-order constraints on their inner activity. Imagine your whole life's memory superimposed on your 'now' state with immediacy and concreteness, as described before. Don't you imagine this would give you a level of holistic insight into the lenses that condition your understanding of experience which is normally unavailable, or can only be patched together with dim conceptual fragments which feel ghostly and lack substantial reality? Is the fact that we have not become the Godhead in this inner developmental process a justification to put Imaginative cognition on the same plane as NDEs and so forth?

All of this is part and parcel of addressing your etheric plant question, as well. Nothing I can say in response will make sense unless these basic foundations are understood. As Cleric already said before, "the context in which we ask the question and expect its answer is even more important than the answer itself... Such things can be comprehended only when livingly followed in their manifold relations." There is no answer in the form of "I experience X, Y, Z when utilizing my 'exact clairvoyance' to look at the seed, then I go about doing A, B, C to verify that X, Y, Z was accurate and not just a hallucination." We aren't doing chemistry experiments here, even though the inner experience of Imaginative thinking is as concentrated, exact, and intuitively understood as the inner experience of natural scientific (mathematical) thinking.

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"That is, you keep talking about the "Anthroposophists of the future" as if it is unimaginable that those of today (or Steiner himself) have already understood and overcome the conditioning obstacles you are referring to."

So far there is almost no impulse in the formal movement to even acknowledge blind-spots. So, yes, I do think it will mainly be in the future that we find Anthroposophy articulating itself that way. There is still massive reactivity (or numbness) in just suggesting that Steiner's clairvoyance had deletions, distortions, and generalizations functioning that he wasn't aware of. I don't think that will be a big deal in a future in which Anthroposophy is alive and well. Of course it is incarnating in informal contexts as well.

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"All of this is part and parcel of addressing your etheric plant question, as well. Nothing I can say in response will make sense unless these basic foundations are understood."

That's rich. I collect these responses to this. Steiner was comfortable giving basic descriptions of this kind of clairvoyance to strangers in public lectures. Any 'exact clairvoyant' you find today always has a reason they won't simply describe it. Except for the few that make stuff up and get exposed.

If I asked you to describe your experiences in London, you'd do it. You'd enjoy it. If I asked you to describe your experience doing a directly given work picture exercise you'd do it.

I'll assume that right now you are looking at seed and examining the plant's etheric body. Can you describe that? And, instead, meta commentary. Anyway, if you have achieved the first stage of exact clairvoyance, please describe what it's like when you observe the etheric body of plants, and just share a little in terms of the journey of calibrating that. You've written some posts with ten paragraphs of complex phenomenology. Steiner would say seven or eight sentences describing his experience. I don't need 10 paragraphs.

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Oh, and if you are not at the stage where you can reliably see the plant's etheric body, I assume you'll just say so. I can't imagine why that would be avoided.

[Cleric]

Seems to me that many of the spiritual schools offer very satisfying ways of reaching the spiritual world. This is why I say I'm open and excited IF someday there are spiritual scientists in the form that Steiner predicted. Just because I don't think that is necessary for his carrying forward of Anthroposophia to be fruitful doesn't mean I think it is impossible.

FB, we really need to synchronize our understanding of what the spiritual world is and what it means to have consciousness of it. Let’s try the following. Imagine that someone else asks me that question: “What is the spiritual world and what does it mean to have consciousness of it?” Below I’ll answer to that person. In other words, assume that what is written is not directed to you personally. Instead, I’m speaking to a hypothetical person and at the end, you can simply respond with something like “Yes, this is pretty much how I would have described things myself” or “This doesn’t make sense to me. I think this will leave the person completely confused and dangerously misled.” I’ll color the text below in order to serve as a constant reminder that it is addressed to that someone else.

Alright, let’s start with a little analogy. Imagine a person who doesn’t have any idea of mathematics. Not even numbers. Realistically, this would probably be a small child but let’s imagine that we can speak more philosophically with it.

A: I want to tell you about a very interesting kind of inner activity. It’s a little difficult to describe because I can’t compare it with anything that you already know, so it’ll take some effort and patience. Consider the following drawing:



B: Oh, I know that game! Let me…



B: There!
A: Well, that’s pretty, you have talent for sure, but it is not the game I have in mind. See, what I have drawn is not arbitrary. I didn’t just pull it out of my imagination. There are certain secret constraints and lawfulness that led me to draw that.
B: But that’s exactly what I did. Your drawing placed certain constraints on my imagination. What I drew was not completely arbitrary. Of all the things I could have imagined, I imagined only such things that could fit into your initial pictures.
A: Yes, I don’t argue that you did just that, but it’s still not what I try to explain. You see, what you have drawn is still based on things that you have seen before and now build up the palette of your imagination. You just used my drawing as a kind of filter for your imaginative potential. You drew pictures in your imagination which were compatible with my drawing.
B: Well, the only difference is that you started with a blank page. Were I to start with a blank page, I could have come upon images that are completely unconstrained.
A: Yes, yes, but you see, what I’m trying to tell you is that even though I started with a blank page, my images were still constrained in a certain way that has nothing to do with things that can be seen in the usual sense. It is this ‘way’ that I’m trying to tell you about.
B: Well, I can play that game too if you want. I can start with a blank page and think of some constraints. For example, I can think “I’ll now limit myself to imagining fantastic unicorns that neither I nor anyone else has seen before” and I’ll draw them. What’s the difference with what you have done? You have simply limited yourself to drawing not-very-pretty lines and curves.
A: Yes, but it’s the nature of these constraints that I want to talk about. For example, I don’t need to use exactly these images. I can convey the same thing using completely different images, say:



B: This is not very fun. You are just making up rules and want others to play by them.
A: But I’m not making up these rules, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. For example, when you draw the bee, there are already rules enforced by Nature. You are drawing something that looks like what Nature has shown you. Even when you draw the fantastic unicorn you are still only trying to arrange colors and shapes that Nature has shown you, albeit in novel ways. I’m speaking of a kind of invisible Nature that we can know not with our eyes but in a different way, and still draw pictures that tell something about that seeing.
B: I don’t know. I think that you are simply a grumpy old man who tries to make all kinds of rules for kids like me. You adults are boring, you know? Why would I ever want to place invisible constraints on my imagination? This is what you adults do, isn’t it? You always want things to happen in the way you want. You are tired of life, of what is new, creative, and unpredictable. Instead, you want to enchain everything in rules. This gives you a false feeling that you are ‘in control’.
A: No, what I’m trying to tell you is that there are certain rules and constraints that we cannot see. Just because we don’t see them it doesn’t mean our imagination is not already constrained in some ways. That’s why I’m trying to tell you about a kind of inner activity that is able to recognize and explore its own constraints.
B: And how do I know that you are not only imagining such an inner activity that invents its own limitations and falls into them?
A: But here’s the thing: you cannot ‘imagine’ that activity. In your current state you can re-imagine the pictures that I’ve drawn but you can’t imagine the way in which I have produced them. The inner activity through which I produced the images cannot be imagined, it must be lived through and this living through is at the same time the direct experience of its reality. Otherwise, it’s like someone asking you “How do you know that you imagine that bee and not that you only imagine that you imagine it?” Doesn’t make sense, does it?
B: The only thing that doesn’t make sense is you! It’s obvious that you have succumbed to a very limited region of your imaginative activity, you produce from there some crappy pictures, imagine that you are doing that in some magical way that others don’t understand, and on top of that, you try to pull everyone else in your little trap. Get lost, old man!
A: Ahh.. Alright, I think we are done for today. Go play.

Even though humorous, we need to internalize this dialog, because most of the misunderstandings we face when we try to speak of the spiritual world are directly analogous to the above conversation. For anyone who has experienced some mathematical thinking, it is very clear that the mathematical symbols are not simply something that we pull out of our imagination, but they are ways to describe the inner intuitive movements that we perform. This is the key here. We are exploring ideal activity. Our mathematical thoughts exist in certain ideal relations. When we look at the symbols ‘2 + 3’ we don’t see contained in them what they can do, in what relations they exist, etc. If that was the case, the child would be the first to perceive them. Instead, it is only in the living experience of our ideal activity that these things can be explored. In a sense, through our thinking, we become conscious of a world of ideal mathematical concepts and their relations. By saying ‘world’, it is not meant some speculative Platonic realm where these concepts and relations exist as metaphysical entities, but only the totality of our direct intuitive experience with its explored and not yet explored aspects.

From analogy to reality

To transition from the limited mathematical analogy to understanding the greater spiritual world, we should conceive of it similarly – not as a speculative metaphysical realm ‘out there’ but as the growing intuitive totality of our inner experience. The difference is that we now need to consider things in a much greater scope. The child is right about one thing – the mathematical thinking activity is indeed only a more limited domain within the total possibilities of our spirit. To know the greater spiritual world we should investigate not only the mathematical sub-totality but that of our total conscious existence. For example, when the child above complains about being given unnecessary constraints to its imagination, this doesn’t mean that this imagination does not already operate within certain constraints. As said, the child is most likely to draw things that it has already seen with its eyes. And even if it fantasizes something new, this doesn’t mean that it has somehow consciously and freely chosen what to fantasize. Just because the images simply pop up in consciousness, it doesn’t mean that they do not manifest within the most manifold subconscious and organic constraints. But most importantly, the child is completely unaware of the constraints that prevent it from understanding what A tries to explain. The child’s inner flow is steered by its feelings of sympathy for seemingly free and easy-going imagination. What A tells feels antipathetic (even if irrationally) and thus its soul stream is repelled from the potential inner flow direction it could have taken were it to take seriously that A is speaking of something real which B is unfamiliar with.

Effortful inner activity

The next thing to consider is that the mathematical images can only come about in the right way through effortful inner activity. These images reflect our inner activity, they are not just randomly and spontaneously pulled out of the potential of freely precipitating imagination. For example, if we are some kind of Rain Man, we may experience such mathematical symbols completely spontaneously and effortlessly. They may still exhibit the precise ideal relations intrinsic to the mathematical world, but in our consciousness we have absolutely no inkling of that. We directly receive finished answers. We may not even know how to add numbers, yet when someone asks about X+Y, the correct answer simply bubbles up in our consciousness as a finished numeric mental picture. This would correspond to a kind of atavistic clairvoyance of the spiritual world. We experience images that we recognize as reflecting something of the spiritual world and its secret ideal relations, but since we do not live consciously within these ideal constraints, they still appear to us as something enigmatic. They raise more questions than they answer. An atavistic mathematician would have to say “This is interesting, these spontaneous number-symbols that pop up in my consciousness describe some special lawfulness, yet I don’t know how to even begin approaching that lawfulness. Even though these images answer mathematical questions, my intellect is confronted with even more questions about where they come from, how these answers take form, what mechanisms and laws they conform to, and so on.”

The answer in the mathematical case is clear. If we expect the ideal relations to present themselves simply as additional atavistic images on top of the first ones, the problem only regresses further. We are still ‘here’ with our questioning intellect and marvel about the world ‘over there’ from whence the images emerge. The only way to know the intimate ideal nature of the mathematical world is by plunging our thinking process into its lawfulness. Then we no longer see the symbols atavistically arriving from some unknown realm, but they are the reflections of our most intimate and directly known thinking activity that is ‘touching’ its way through the ideal consonances and dissonances of mathematical relations.

The intellect as thinking decomposed into time and space

Mathematical thinking cannot be taken as a one-to-one example of cognizing the wider spiritual world because that kind of thinking constitutes only one particular form of inner activity. Namely, in mathematical thinking we have a perfect decomposition of our inner process into (1) timeless mathematical concepts and their relations, and (2) temporal inner activity that explores these relations. For example, when we take 2+3=5, we have a completely timeless relation. This relation remains what it is today, yesterday, and tomorrow. In these purely timeless relations, there’s no process where 2 and 3 combine into 5, or 5 decomposes into 2 and 3. Such processes exist only in our temporal thinking activity that touches its way through the timeless. As an analogy, imagine that we are blindfolded and we are given an object that we have to recognize by touching it. We touch one side, then another, and gradually recognize it as a cube. This cube didn’t come into being precisely through this sequence of touching its sides. Someone else may touch the sides in a different order. It is a spatial object that is incrementally known by temporal touching activity. Analogously, a timeless ideal form or relation between forms is explored temporally by our intuitive thinking activity.

Grasping our intuitive activity as the living World process

This perfect decomposition of our inner life into completely timeless (in a sense dead, inorganic, mineral-like) concepts and our living (dynamic, organic) inner activity that moves through the timeless, is what gives us the characteristic sense that we are a subjective mind, and the mathematical objects are merely the inert concepts of cognition (mere thoughts in our mind), which are in themselves abstract and only map to the greater reality. In other words, our cognitive process is very conveniently split into a subjective thinking flow (time) and timeless objects of thinking (space). All of this needs to become different if we are to approach cognition of the wider spiritual world. Why? Simply because if we are to grasp the fullness of reality we can no longer pretend that the thinking process stands outside of it and builds a completely subjective and abstract intuitive scheme about how reality on the objective side operates. Instead, the thinking process itself has to become known as an inseparable part of the organic process of reality.

This however leads us into an inner conflict if we insist on using our familiar perfectly decomposed inner process. Our living thinking process by its nature is moving and morphing. It feels that we need to deaden it, to make it into timeless conceptual forms in order to grasp it objectively (for example by imagining neurons, computations, energies, etc.). But the more we focus on the space-like timeless forms, the less we are aware of the organic time-like activity that thinks those forms.

When seen in this way, we realize that our whole conscious existence lives along a spectrum from decomposed thinking toward gradations where spiritual activity needs to know itself more and more as an active living intuitive force that is reflected in correspondingly ever-metamorphosing inner phenomena. Thus the living spiritual process can know itself only in vivo, by simultaneously acting and perceiving the real-time ripples of its activity. The moment we try to analyze the ripples, we lose clear awareness of the analyzing activity itself and instead, we are fully absorbed into the meaning of the timeless concepts. To regain that awareness we need to recognize how the analyzing thoughts themselves are reflections of the real-time organic thinking process.

This seems like an unresolvable conundrum only if we imagine that decomposed intellectual thinking is the only way in which the spirit can know itself. When we begin to grasp the above-described real-time inner activity, we no longer call ‘knowledge’ the assemblies of mental images that model (represent) reality, but our real-time creative skills of steering the inner flow and immediately perceiving its feedback. Not by jumping back and forth between the two, but in one continuous stream of spiritual existence. This mode of cognition can only be approached through meditative concentration. Here the temporal and the timeless fuse together. A movie projector may be showing a single static dot on screen, but it is continuously replenished by new floods of light. In the same way, in concentration, we strive to stabilize and focus our ray of intuitive activity into a single mental image and experience there the real-time reflection of the activity itself (which implicitly tells something about its context too).

Summary

To summarize. The spiritual world is not something that is out there, on the other side of our inner existence. This seems so only if we unknowingly cling to the conception of atavistic clairvoyance (which dominates popular consciousness) where it is imagined that images, symbols, messages, feelings, emotions, sensations, presences, etc., pop into consciousness in a Rain Man-like way. Then we use our intuitive intellect to make sense of these messages, we wonder which are true, which are illusions, we try to patch up some conception of the spiritual world from whence these phenomena precipitate, alas the inner workings of that world remain something enigmatic, laying beyond the scope of our decomposed thinking.

To find the inner reality of these inner workings we don’t go look for them up or down, left or right. Mathematics is our teacher here. To find the ideal reality of addition, we can’t remain with our Rain Man mentality and expect the answer to precipitate as yet another enigmatic number from beyond, overlaid on top of the others. Instead, we realize that our thinking already lives in that world, it is its natural environment, just like we conceive that tables and chairs are the natural environment relative to our body. In the sensory world we bump into the chairs, while in the mathematical, our thinking ‘bumps’ into purely intuitive consonances and dissonances.

Higher cognition of the greater spiritual world grows entirely from this foundation, except that we are no longer investigating the limited domain of mathematical concepts but we try to reach into the ideal reality within which our total inner flow moves. Once again, we don’t find this reality by looking left or right but by making our organic intuitive activity a lived experience through meditative concentration. The spiritual world is known only as far as we can know the invisible processes within which our organic thinking unfolds.

Initially, these processes within which our meditative flow is embedded are only felt. We feel their pushes and pulls, attractions and repulsions. For example, if the child were to turn attention to its dislike of what A speaks about, it would already be a little bit clairvoyant about the inner process within which its ranting flow manifests. It could say to itself “The fact that I don’t want to hear what A is talking about tells me that my cognition lives within an invisible feeling elastic landscape. Just like in the sensory spectrum I can feel certain fear stimulated by the heat of an open fire which prevents me from getting too close and burning myself, so there’s something in my feelings that prevents me from approaching what A says. The question is whether this is a justified fear or is simply a fear of the unknown, which I won’t even admit to myself but rather mask in pride and assume that A is simply trying to pull the wool before my eyes.”

Further, when meditative concentration grows even deeper, these dim pushing and pulling forces of our inner life become increasingly ideal (intuitive) in nature. For example, when in mathematical intuition I explore the sequence of natural numbers and put 3 after 1, I feel certain ideal dissonance. At a lower level this may manifest only as a dim ‘gut’ feeling. I feel certain antipathy to this thinking sequence, it doesn’t feel aesthetically pleasing. When these feelings are refined, however, they transform into a rich ideal sense of meaningful musical consonances and dissonances. Now I do not simply have a gut feeling, but grasp in my ideal life the landscape of numerical relations and see exactly how on a lower level the ideal dissonance was only emotionally felt, but on a higher level is intuitively known.

The same principle holds for the consciousness of the greater spiritual world, except that we no longer deal with timeless mathematical relations, but our thinking process turns into the seed point from which our consciousness awakens within the intuitive reality of the World process (our thinking process is a portion of the World process. It is modulated over the latter, as ripples over greater waves, so to speak). Now instead of trying to map our inorganic concepts over the perceptions of the World flow (including the sensations of atavistic clairvoyance), we become familiar with the inner intuitive intents that propel that flow. They are known in exactly the same intimate inner way in which we know the ideal constraints of mathematical thinking, except that now these constraints are living intuitive processes, having a will of their own. In this way, we recognize that, for example, the true forces behind plant growth are of the same intuitively intentional nature. We can only recognize the essence of the life processes in Nature if we gain consciousness of our own thinking as one such growth process that is an intrinsic part of Nature and driven by intuitive spiritual activity, navigating a world of ideal organic constraints.

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I won't be able to read through that example for some time. I'll let you know once I do.

[Cleric]

I won't be able to read through that example for some time. I'll let you know once I do.

No problem, thanks for letting us know.